Romola Quotes

“His faith wavered, but not his speech: it is the lot of every man who has to speak for the satisfaction of the crowd, that he must often speak in virtue of yesterday's faith, hoping it will come back to-morrow.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“Romola had had contact with no mind that could stir the larger possibilities of her nature; they lay folded and crushed like embryonic wings, making no element in her consciousness beyond an occasional vague uneasiness.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors.”
― George Eliot, Romola [with Biographical Introduction]

“We prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil which gradually determines character.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“You come as opportunely as cheese on macaroni.”
― George Eliot, Romola [with Biographical Introduction]

“It is but once that we can know our worst sorrows.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“Ah, Iddio non paga il Sabatol (‘God does not pay on a Saturday’)—the wages of men’s sins often linger in their payment, and I myself saw much established wickedness of long-standing prosperity.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“And in this way he had learned to distrust men without bitterness; looking on life mainly as a game of skill, but not dead to traditions of heroism and clean-handed honour.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“There has been no great people without processions, and the man who thinks himself too wise to be moved by them to anything but contempt, is like the puddle that was proud of standing alone while the river rushed by.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“The law was sacred, yes, but the rebellion might be sacred too. ... the problem where the sacredness of obedience ended and where the sacredness of rebellion began. ... there had come one of those moments in life when the soul must dare to act on its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to but in the face of a law which is not unarmed with divine lightnings, lightings which might yet fall if the warrant has been false”
― George Eliot, Romola

“He would have been equal to any sacrifice that was not unpleasant.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“When, the next morning, Tito put this determination into act he had chosen his colour in the game, and had given an inevitable bent to his wishes. He had made it impossible that he should not from henceforth desire it to be the truth that his father was dead; impossible that he should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the precise facts of his conduct should not remain for ever concealed.

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission than in the consequent adjustment of our desires—the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is for ever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“These things have not changed. The sunlight and shadows bring their old beauty and waken the old heart-strains at morning, noon, and eventide; the little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty; and men still yearn for the reign of peace and righteousness”
― George Eliot, Romola [with Biographical Introduction]

“All minds, except such as are delivered from doubt by dulness of sensibility, must be subject to this recurring conflict where the many-twisted conditions of life have forbidden the fulfilment of a bond. For in strictness there is no replacing of relations: the presence of the new does not nullify the failure and breach of the old. Life has lost its perfection: it has been maimed; and until the wounds are quite scarred, conscience continually casts backward, doubting glances.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“More than three centuries and a half ago, in the mid spring-time of 1492, we are sure that the angel of the dawn, as he travelled with broad slow wing from the Levant to the Pillars of Hercules, and from the summits of the Caucasus across all the snowy Alpine ridges to the dark nakedness of the Western isles, saw nearly the same outline of firm land and unstable sea”
― George Eliot, Romola

“The eager theorizing of ages is compressed, as in a seed, in the want of a single mind.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“They were too hopelessly alienated in their inner life ever to have that contest which is an effort towards agreement.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“Life was so complicated a game that the devices of skill were liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“But veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“Habet nescio quid latentis energiae vivae vocis actus, et in aures discipuli de auctoris ore transfusa fortis sonat.’” Chapter”
― George Eliot, Romola

“It was the glance of caged fury that sees its prey passing safe beyond the bars.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“And perhaps of all sombre paths that on which we go back after treading it with a strong resolution is the one that most severely tests the fervour of renunciation.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“But that force of outward symbols by which our active life is knit together so as to make an inexorable external identity for us, not to be shaken by our wavering consciousness, gave a strange effect to this simple movement towards taking off her ring—a movement which was but a small sequence of her energetic resolution.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“The exhaustion consequent on violent emotion is apt to bring a dreamy disbelief in the reality of its cause;”
― George Eliot, Romola

“The laborious simple life, pure from vulgar corrupting ambitions, embittered by the frustration of the dearest hopes, imprisoned at last in total darkness—a long seed-time without a harvest—was at an end now, and all that remained of it besides the tablet in Sante Croce and the unfinished commentary on Tito’s text, was the collection of manuscripts and antiquities, the fruit of half a century’s toil and frugality.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“Altogether this world, with its partitioned empire and its roomy universal Church, seemed to be a handsome establishment for the few who were lucky or wise enough to reap the advantages of human folly: a world in which lust and obscenity, lying and treachery, oppression and murder, were pleasant, useful, and when properly managed, not dangerous. And as a sort of fringe or adornment to the substantial delights of tyranny, avarice, and lasciviousness, there was the patronage of polite learning and the fine arts, so that flattery could always be had in the choicest Latin to be commanded at that time, and sublime artists were at hand to paint the holy and the unclean with impartial”
― George Eliot, Romola

“We Florentines hold no man a member of an Art till he has shown his skill and been matriculated; and no man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted. If you make up your mind to put your florins out to usury, you can let me know to-morrow. A scholar may marry, and should have something in readiness for the morgen”
― George Eliot, Romola

“that they have been the delusive prologue to an age worse than that of iron—the age of tinsel and gossamer, in which no thought has substance enough to be moulded into consistent and lasting form.”
― George Eliot, Romola

“though indeed the barbarous Sultans have of late shown themselves not indisposed to engraft on their wild stock the precious vine which their own fierce bands have hewn down and trampled under foot. From what part of Greece do you come?”
― George Eliot, Romola

“dropped suddenly in Romola’s young but wintry life, which had inherited nothing but memories—memories of a dead mother, of a lost brother, of a blind father’s happier time—memories of far-off light, love, and beauty, that lay embedded in dark mines of books, and could hardly give out their brightness again until they were kindled for her by the torch of some known joy.”
― George Eliot, Romola